(CNN) – Mike Huckabee says he’s against changing portions of the Constitution that automatically grant citizenship to children of immigrants born in the United States – a position that puts the potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate at odds some of his party’s most prominent figures.

In an interview that aired on NPR Wednesday, the former Arkansas governor and 2008 White House hopeful said the section of the 14th Amendment currently in question has long been held valid.

“The Supreme Court has decided that, I think, in three different centuries, said Huckabeee. “In every single instance, they have affirmed that if you are born in this country, you are considered to be a citizen. The only option there is to change the constitution.”

Asked specifically if he would favor such an effort to change the constitution, Huckabee said flatly, “No.”

“Let me tell you what I would favor. I would favor having controlled borders,” he said. “But that’s where the federal government has miserably and hopelessly failed us.”

A couple of items in the news lately have brought the judiciary back into the consciousness of the American public; the announced retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, and the recent decision by federal judge Barbara Crabb in Wisconsin in which she ruled that the National Day of Prayer is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In the rulings of both justices we find an egregious disrespect for the plain meaning of the Constitution, and it is a failure of the American people to learn the Constitution that has allowed us to stray so far.

As a nation, we have reached a point where we bestow upon the courts an unjustified level of deference to their perceived wisdom. In fact, the Founding Fathers created the judiciary to be the weakest of the three branches, vested as they are with lifetime appointments.

Thomas Jefferson wrote (in a letter to William C. Jarvis, 1820) that “To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so.” Yet today we have allowed the courts to be elevated to the level of an oligarchy, where we accept rulings that are clearly unaligned with the Constitution without so much as a whimper.

In the 15 months since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in United States v. Windsor in June 2013, which invalidated the strict federal definition of marriage from the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, seven other cases were appealed to the Court, all of which last ruled at the Circuit-level that the state same-sex marriage bans in question were unconstitutional.

In a stunning decision Monday, the Court denied the appeals of all seven cases, meaning the Circuit decisions unanimously striking down those bans are upheld and same-sex couples will soon have equal marriage rights in all states under those Circuits’ jurisdiction.

Nearly everyone expected the Roberts court to grant certiori to the cases and bundle them together to issue a final sweeping ruling on the issue at the end of its next term in mid-2015, so the blanket denial shocked the legal and political communities. It only takes four of the nine justices to grant certiori, so in effect, this was at minimum a 6-3 default ruling in favor of marriage equality.

With the renewed interest in the intersection between technology (specifically, the kind that enables surveillance) and traditional Constitutional notions about freedom and privacy, a two-year-old Supreme Court case has left the door open for clarification on just what technologies law enforcement can use to monitor and enforce the law. Or, depending on your perspective, has made the situation more confusing:

Judges around the country are grappling with the ripple effects of a 2-year-old Supreme Court ruling on GPS tracking, reaching conflicting conclusions on the case’s broader meaning and tackling unresolved questions that flare in a world where privacy and technology increasingly collide.

The January 2012 opinion in United States v. Jones set constitutional boundaries for law enforcement’s use of GPS devices to track the whereabouts of criminal suspects. But the different legal rationales offered by the justices have left a muddled legal landscape for police and lower-court judges, who have struggled in the last two years with how and when to apply the decision — especially at a time when new technologies are developed at a faster rate than judicial opinions are issued.

At age 80, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, leader of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing, says she is in excellent health, even lifting weights despite having cracked a pair of ribs again, and plans to stay several more years on the bench.

In a Reuters interview late on Tuesday, she vowed to resist any pressure to retire that might come from liberals who want to ensure that Democratic President Barack Obama can pick her successor before the November 2016 presidential election.

Ginsburg said she had fallen in the bathroom of her home in early May, sustaining the same injury she suffered last year near term’s end.[…]The justice, who survived two serious bouts with cancer, in 1999 and 2009, is keeping up a typically busy summer of travel, at home and abroad, beginning next week with a trip to Paris. Ginsburg said she was back to her usual weight-lifting routine and recently had good results from a bone density scan.

These comments are similar to hints dropped by Ginsburg back in 2011, when she joked that she had “a way to go” to catch up with Justice Louis Brandeis, who retired when he was 83. That indicated that she would stay on the Court until at least 2016.

In a decision that is being viciously derided by the Left, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act because the standards by which the federal government reviewed changes in certain states’ election laws were out of date.

The case, Shelby County v. Holder, asked the Court to review two specific sections of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted by Congress in 1965 as a response to pervasive Jim Crow laws in the South. These laws, which were a scourge on our history, mandated racial segregation and discouraged minorities from voting.

Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act set determined the states that were subject to pre-clearance requirement in Section 5 based on the number of minority voters they had registered. While this section of the law was undoubtedly needed in 1965, the screening forumla is out-of-date. Moreover, the process for approval is arduous and costly for states.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that the criteria needs to be updated to reflect current conditions in order to justify pre-clearence for states with a track record for racial discrimination.

“Congress could have updated the coverage formula at that time, but did not do so, noted Roberts. “Its failure to act leaves us today with no choice but to declare [Section] 4(b) unconstitutional. The formula in that section can no longer be used as a basis for subjecting jurisdictions to preclearance.”

“The specific issue is the scope of the Constitution’s grant of presidential power to put an official temporarily into office without Senate approval – a power that arises when the Senate is not on hand to review that appointment,”noted Denniston. “Answering that could require the Court to define when the Senate, in a legal sense, goes into recess.”

“The issue goes as far back as recess appointments by George Washington, but it also is as new as the latest partisan jousting between President Obama and Senate Republicans over his appointment power,” he added. “The gridlock over Obama nominees has threatened to make one government agency – the NLRB – unable to function.”

The Constitution, in Artlcle II, Section 2, provides the president with the power to submit nominations for “Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.” These nominations are reviewed by the Senate, though its “advice and consent” role, and must be approved by 2/3 of that chamber.